The Bakeoff

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ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY about creating the ultimate cookie. Steve Gundrum launched Project Delta last fall. Gundrum runs Mattson, one of the country's foremost food research-and-development (R. & D.) firms, which is located in Silicon Valley. Mattson created Mrs. Fields Chocolate Chip Cookie and many more supermarket products. That evening, Gundrum had invited some of his colleagues to dinner, and he informed them that he intended to reinvent the cookie, to make something both nutritious and “indulgent.” A healthful, good-tasting cookie is something of a contradiction. A cookie represents the combination of 3 unhealthful ingredients-sugar, white flour, and shortening. Over the years, every healthy cookie has compromised flavor and tenderness. But Gundrum was undeterred. He wanted Project Delta to create the world's greatest cookie in 6 months, and he would enlist the biggest players in the U.S. food industry and then hold a bakeoff to determine the winner. The standard protocol for inventing something in the food industry is called the matrix model. Describes two different software movements: “open source,” led by Linus Torvald, which invites numerous programmers to contribute to the development of an idea; and “extreme programming” or XP, led by Kent Beck, which proposes programmers work in pairs. For Project Delta, Gundrum decreed there would be three teams, each representing a different methodology of invention. The first would be an XP team comprised of Mattson associates Peter Dea and Dan Howell. The second team-a traditional hierarchical one-was headed by Barb Stuckey, an executive VP of marketing at Mattson, and included Doug Berg, head of one of Mattson's product-development teams. The third team would be “open source,” comprised of an online Dream Team of 15 of the top food-industry bakers and scientists. Mentions Jennie-O. Dea and Howell took over part of the Mattson kitchens and began baking. The cookies had to have fewer than 130 calories per serving, with saturated fat under 2 grams. They decided to focus on a kind of oatmeal-chocolate-chip hybrid. Mentions Hidden Valley Ranch principle. Team Stuckey, meanwhile, decided to create a strawberry-cobbler cookie. The Dream Team was the overwhelming Project Delta favorite. It came up with 34 ideas, but soon took a difficult turn. Mentions J. Hugh McEvoy (a.k.a. Chef J.), who pushed for a very exotic cookie. The Dream Team took twice as long as the XP team and created ten times the headache. In the end, the team decided on a chewy oatmeal cookie with ribbons of caramel-and-chocolate glaze. One of the truths Project Delta exposed is that we tend to overestimate the importance of expertise and underestimate the problem of friction. Describes a similar problem at a North Carolina nuclear power plant in the 1990s; mentions David Klinger. Because there are so many people involved in an open-source project, no one can agree on the right way to do things, thereby frustrating the central goal of good design. Mentions software theorist Joel Spolsky. Meanwhile, Dea and Howell continued to make steady improvements. And Barb Stuckey applied the idea of a tortilla-chip's topical seasoning to the strawberry-cobbler cookie-dusting it with large crystals of sugar. Team Stuckey presented their cookies to Mattson food technologist Karen Smithson, who called it “brilliant.” The bakeoff took place in April. Mattson selected 3,000 households from around the country and mailed the entries out to them. The vote was unequivocal: 14% voted for the XP oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookie; 41% voted for the Dream Team's oatmeal-caramel cookie; 44% voted for Team Stuckey's strawberry cobbler. In the end, it was not so much which cookie won that interested Gundrum. It was who won-and why. The decisive edge had come not from the collective wisdom of a large group but from one person's ability to make a lateral connection between two previously unconnected objects-a tortilla chip and a cookie.